


a love story for the new age

by jokeperalta



Category: Rebellion (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Light Angst, Literal Sleeping Together, One Shot, Set between Episodes Two and Three, me: continues to write fics no one wants, undeclared love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 08:52:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7428223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokeperalta/pseuds/jokeperalta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Of all the clothes I could have been wearing that day," she murmurs to him with a trace of wry humour. "Of course I had to be wearing my damn wedding dress."</p>
            </blockquote>





	a love story for the new age

 

She finds him in a dark, quiet corridor of the GPO, knees pulled up to his chest on the floor. The GPO itself is still a hive of activity. After all, the second they all let their guard down that little bit too much is the second they die and more importantly- the cause dies.

Elizabeth only ever allows herself to be dismissed from her duties for a few hours rest when her hands are too shaky to work and when she begins putting patients at risk more than she helps them by trying to work through her muddled mind and deliriously tired eyes. Even then she feels as though there's something she ought to be doing rather than wasting time with needs of her body.

It's him she always seeks out when she's relieved of duty. It's partly to ease loneliness with a familiar face. All of the people around her are her comrades, she can count on all of them but she doesn't know many of them. When she wants to talk about her family, there's no one but Jimmy who knows her well enough to understand. Anyone else would see her as a poor little rich girl, out of her depth.

(Sometimes she thinks no one in the world understands her as Jimmy does. It's frightening and addictive that she can look into his eyes and see herself as she truly is.)

Mostly though, she needs to know he's still here. When he's away, when she can't find him, she worries. More than herself, she's always worrying for him. That he might have been captured; or bleeding out all alone from a bullet wound on a Dublin side street somewhere, too far for her to reach him. Seeing him always brings about a heady sense of relief, _he's still alive he's still here they're both okay_. She doesn't like going to sleep before she's checked up on him. Without knowing where he is.

He smiles wanly at her in the darkness, tired to the bone as she is, and moves his shotgun so she can sit. Elizabeth's body gives out from under her. They huddle close enough that their shoulders are pressed tightly together.

In dangerous times, she takes the feeling of safety wherever she can get it.

/

They don't sleep at first.

Elizabeth scans him for injuries he might have received since they last saw each other and Jimmy lets her, knowing she won't relax any until she's sure. She breathes out when she's satisfied he's unharmed, leaning back against the wall.

They sit like that for a while, quiet and taking comfort from each other's presence. Jimmy is vaguely aware of the people rushing past their corridor, always on his guard for serious trouble, but his eyes always find their way back to her. His ears attune to the comforting sound of her breathing even in spite of the hum of noise around them. She's wholly impossible to ignore, she always has been.

(He remembers: Liz walking into her first socialists meeting with her well-born chin held high, defiant, asking in her soft strong voice if she might join them. In her fine clothes and with her family's name, she'd been mocked for longer than any other new recruit. Jimmy hadn't taken her seriously at first. Acted sullen and distant with her when she was placed under his guidance, until her steadfast commitment and dedication to their cause won him over in increments. Jimmy almost feels like he never stopped watching her from that first day.)

He watches her still as Elizabeth pulls the hem of her dress between her delicate fingers. It's a world away from the snowy white it once was when he caught sight of her leaving her home that day when it all began. The fine, expensive silk is grimy and dusty down to the thread and ripped in more than one place. Spatters of blood dot and criss-cross in random patterns over the bodice and on the lace trimmings from the injured. Her dark hair escapes in thick unkempt locks framing her face. Even exhausted and unwashed for days, she's never looked more beautiful to him.

"Of all the clothes I could have been wearing that day," she murmurs to him with a trace of wry humour. "Of course I had to be wearing my damn wedding dress."

Jimmy smiles. "It's as good a frock as any to do battle in."

"You wouldn't be saying that if you were the one tripping over your own skirts anytime you try to walk faster than the speed of a wedding march," Liz tells him darkly.

"True," he concedes. "I don't suppose they design them for much other than walking aisles and pledging obedience and the like."

Jimmy feels Elizabeth bristle slightly beside him, knew how that particular caveat of the vows grate on her. How it was only ever the bride who was obliged to state her obedience in front of the Lord. She'd told him once that she'd taken her annoyance with it up with Stephen only to receive blank faced incomprehension at her opposition to it.

But she rolls her head around to him, a smile playing on her lips. "My dress maker didn't ask if I needed any practical alterations for running away with another man on my wedding day to join an revolution, no."

Somewhere he can almost hear his mam berating him for his appalling impropriety: his tempting a woman away from her husband-to-be practically at the altar. But Elizabeth chose to come with him with fire in her eyes and conviction in her heart.

It hadn't even occurred to him not to go to her first when he got word the rising was back on, her wedding day or no. There was no question in his mind at least she had to be there. More than that, she deserved to be there-- at the precipice of a better future.

(Perhaps he was a little more than willing to interrupt her wedding day for other reasons too. For giving her the chance to not go through with a marriage he and Elizabeth both know was to please her parents, to a man she could never really love. Maybe he's glad it isn't now a married woman he's in love with when his heart thrums for her.)

"Shocking oversight," Jimmy says, shaking his head. Liz smiles, properly now, tired eyes lighting the darkness with her mirth. It's good to see it.

She leans her head against the wall behind them, curling into herself for warmth and closing her eyes.

"Maybe I'm out of line to say this, I don't know," Jimmy murmurs to her, half sure she's fallen asleep. But dark eyes flutter open to meet his. "But... I'm glad you didn't marry Stephen, Liz."

The moment feels risky in the few inches between his face and hers. He feels the force of years of feelings kept just below the surface on his tongue, carefully unacknowledged until their first separation and threat of never seeing her again.

(They haven't discussed it-- how he kissed her. How she didn't stop him even though just hours before she had been meant to kiss different man in a different church under very different circumstances. How she leaned into his caress. It feels frivolous to talk about such things now, whilst their comrades shed blood on the streets. But it's still there. Always there.)

"There's no one I'd rather be fighting alongside than you," Jimmy whispers. It isn't the whole truth and they both know it but it's enough. It's enough for now. It feels like all they can afford.

Her hand snakes into his. She's cold. "And I you."

Jimmy wraps his arm around her shoulder, his fingers still interlaced with hers. Her head rests in the crook of his neck. Strands of her hair tickle his cheek. Something in him unclenches at their closeness; it feels good, it feels right.

He thinks: _I love you, Elizabeth Butler._

He says: "Up the republic."

(He can't put the burden of the other three words on her, not now, not while either of them -and more likely himself- may still give their lives in this war. Both declarations feel the same to him these days anyway.)

"Up the republic, Jimmy," he hears her mumble into his neck while he drifts off. It's all he needs.

 

**Author's Note:**

> hell, idk i just thought their 'up the republic' exchange at the end was also them saying i love you so sue me lol


End file.
